


The Gates of Alexander

by histrionic



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/Zero
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, i need more atlas institute information!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 01:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17234885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/histrionic/pseuds/histrionic
Summary: AU. Waver Velvet is an alchemist of the Atlas Institute in the years before the incineration of humanity.





	The Gates of Alexander

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t actually know anything about the extended Fate verse and this is kind-of spoilery for FGO. But alchemy? Lacking strong magic circuits? My mind leapt to Waver.

The suggestion was probably kindly meant, or at least offered without the kind of deliberate malice Clock Tower mages were well-versed in. It had been during a group exercise, which to Waver felt and looked like more of an exercise in humiliation; it turned out very few people devoted to status and issues of inheritance willingly partnered with a third-generation mage. 

“Wouldn’t you be more suited for the Atlas Institute?” His partner asked him after Waver explained (gloated about) the error in their alchemical configuration. “Since they don’t really care about magic circuits. Even someone without any pedigree could join.”

Waver brushed the suggestion off, then thought about it, and then thought about it some more. He was, although he loathed to admit it, stagnating in the Clock Tower; he had his thesis, yes, but he doubted that the relevant professors had read even the first deliberately inflammatory sentence. He wasn’t giving up so much as he was taking advantage of a different opportunity, he told himself.

The fact that he had all but walked in through the front doors and received permission to join felt rather anti-climatic, admittedly, but the budget was plentiful enough and Waver Velvet soon found himself in possession of his very own laboratory. The Institute’s alchemists scoffed at the Clock Tower’s teachings as primitive and were even more frighteningly unmoored from modern, non-mage understandings of ethics, but it was a pleasant enough work environment as petty quarrels were prevented from escalating by the very real threat of mutually assured destruction via world-destroying Mystic Codes. The Atlas alchemists had little use for clocks and the simulation sky made it difficult to judge time as the outside world knew it; on an otherwise forgettable day Waver stepped back from a particularly fanciful golem and noticed that his hair reached his waist.

He still believed he could have continued with his research in such a fashion for the rest of his life –not that anyone actually seemed to die here, if he really thought about it, an unsettling but unsurprising realization- if not for the threat of upcoming Armageddon, which suddenly displaced the theoretical development of Spiritron Hacking as the most urgent development in the Institute. Waver was skeptical of the apocalypse in a way that the other alchemists weren’t; they all believed in the beautifully convoluted proof left behind by the first director, although said proof unfortunately didn’t provide any specific dates. Given that every single director seemed to go mad in an attempt to prevent the apocalypse, Waver would hold off believing that this would finally be the year. 

Then the head of the Animusphere family came begging at the Atlas Institute’s door, hoping to build something based off of the Tri-Hermes for some humanity observation center. 

Fuck, Waver thought, and then decided he would deal with it later. “It” being the end of the world. Meanwhile, some of his colleagues began discussing the possibility of downloading people into a cyber world.

Time, space, and reality have never really been the same at the Institute since a workplace accident during the Napoleonic Wars; Waver dealt with the strange dreams accordingly. He had been to the beach once, a long time ago with his parents – but he hardly thought about such a thing now, and the petty arguments that occurred on that occasion were so ordinary that he doubted it had permanently impacted his psyche. Besides, the mist-covered shore and the calm, steady roar of the waves of the dream felt significant, somehow. 

There were a lot of significant things now. Oceans. Unforgiving deserts. The color red. A very familiar back. (A very familiar laugh.)

Waver was, for the first time in over a decade, filled with a kind of restless, nameless dissatisfaction.

Fortunately, Waver now had an idea of what his futile project to prevent the extinction of humanity was. A double handful of colleagues, a few freelance mage-hunters, and some “liberated” research provided by one Professor Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi later, a rudimentary summoning system began to take form. He was far from the main architect, but he’d contributed; even Chaldea seemed interested enough to come asking questions about the system. 

It would work. The calculations, the technology, everything. One way or another, he would have his answer to the apocalypse and his own unrest both. 

Very fleetingly, Waver thought that someone would be proud of him as the summoning circle began to glow white and hum.


End file.
